


With the Lights Off, I See You

by Teatrolley



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, like really angsty but also good in the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 17:10:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4313394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s funny how having another person’s fingers trail your ribs can make you forget about the hollowness of your chest for a moment. A bathroom stall with non-erasable black marker on the walls is not a place for romance, but for heavy eyelids to be shutting in something other than sorrow or exhaustion.</p><p>_________________</p><p>When a struggling Harry meets Draco in a London pub, everything might go terribly wrong. Or it might not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With the Lights Off, I See You

**Author's Note:**

> Have my apologies in advance.

Harry meets Draco three years after The End in a London pub, and when he finds that he has no hatred left in him for the other man, they share a pint. They don’t talk about the past or the future, and especially not the present – Harry doesn’t tell him about his shabby flat where the central heating only works half the time, and the walls are scaling. Instead they discuss music and football and Harry’s breath goes warm when Draco accidently touches his thigh.

It’s funny how having another person’s fingers trail your ribs can make you forget about the hollowness of your chest for a moment. A bathroom stall with non-erasable black marker on the walls is not a place for romance, but for heavy eyelids to be shutting in something other than sorrow or exhaustion. Draco is so pale that his black mark is visible through his button-up shirt, and Harry feels closer to him than he does to Ron and Hermione these days. Maybe it’s because Draco looks like he has a yellow, clammy, cold-fingered creature inside of him, too, grasping at his heartstrings and tying them up so the oxygen won’t reach.

They share a cigarette afterwards, while the early breakings of dawn starts to show on the horizon, but they part before the sun can shine its unforgiving light on the mess they’ve made. 

He only comes over at night. Harry’s flat shares a hallway bathroom with the neighbour, and only has a kitchen and a living room, the latter of those being occupied only by a creaky bed, a tiny television, and a patchwork blanket made by Mrs Weasley. He smokes his cigarettes out of the window in his underwear, and he lets Harry kiss him bruised, but only at 2am. None of this is love, but it’s survival. 

Harry’s days are shifts at the bookstore, dinners with his friends, and endless lonely hours listening to The Smiths on vinyl and staring at a white ceiling, wondering why he even survived at all. The place beneath his ribs is a clump of ice and regret, and the taste on his lips is bitterness.

In the beginning Draco’s fingers are ice as well, but then he buys a plant for Harry and they are green. The photosynthesising creature in the corner of Harry’s flat is kept alive mostly by Draco’s night-visits, which says something about how often they’ve become, but Harry chooses to ignore its words. Instead he lets Draco borrow a jumper one November night, and lies back and allows his kneecap to be kissed, even though kisses on body parts that are not private should be forbidden because of the implications they might lead to. 

One night Draco sits cross-legged on his floor with his shirt off and asks him what they are doing, so Harry kisses him until his mouth is burning, but it’s not a reply: It’s the avoidance of one. He has bruises for days from being pushed into the floor, and when he presses them they disappear, but as soon as he lets go they always come back. He tries not to notice the metaphor. 

Draco stays away for two weeks, but eventually comes back crashing at 3 in the morning, whispering, “you’ve got me shield-less now, Potter,” into his hipbone, so Harry makes him a cup of coffee for his train-ride home.

His grief is almost tangible; possible to hold between his fingers and watch in the yellow lights from the street below. It can be cradled, like something to be held dear, but it can’t be broken. 

Draco brings a photograph of Teddy with him, and somehow Harry cries, and Draco simply lets him. They don’t have sex and Draco stays until the first rays of sunlight hit the bed they share. Harry keeps the photograph in a drawer together with his sleeping pills. 

Sometime not long after Draco’s phone rings during foreplay, and he excuses himself to take it. He listens to the person on the other end, before explaining where he is, going as far as to use Harry’s name, and then the person on the other end says something funny enough to make Draco’s lips split into a grin. Harry sits frozen in place until he hangs up. 

“University roommate,” Draco shrugs after, and Harry didn’t even know he went to uni. He realises he never asked. 

Afterwards Draco pulls on his pants and goes to water Harry’s plant, and Harry watches him from the bed with an orchestra of thoughts in his head. What he ends up saying is, “Tell me about your life.” 

Draco smiles. And then he does. 

After that Draco sometimes cooks Harry breakfast, and Harry sometimes makes him laugh, and they sometimes don’t have sex at all. Harry learns the rhythm of Draco’s breathing when he’s sleeping, and discovers what it’s like to hold someone’s hand while they’re shagging you. 

He mentions Draco to Hermione and Ron in passing, and is surprised when it isn’t an issue. At the bookshop he earns a promotion, and at night he doesn’t always need the sleeping pills anymore. Only when he answers Draco’s phone for him, while he’s in the shower, does he realise, that he knows the name of all of Draco’s friends. 

“You know,” he says to Draco when they’re sitting naked in each other’s laps one Tuesday night, “I think it’d be fine if you, just, didn’t leave … for a while. I mean, I think it’d be cool if you hung around here as long as you’d, you know, like.”

Draco kisses his knuckles and says, “I’m in love with you.”

“Oh,” Harry says. “Okay. That’s fine, too.”

“Have been for quite a while, actually.”

“Right,” Harry says. 

Draco smiles and kisses him, and Harry sees that he very clearly, very deeply feels the same, which he says. 

“I know,” Draco says, and that’s that really. That night Harry doesn’t feel alone.

**Author's Note:**

> If this made you feel something, why don't you leave a comment and tell me so? They're better than dessert to me, and I really like dessert.


End file.
